An award-winning French filmmaker, he won an Oscar for “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs.” But he divided audiences with explorations of misogyny and the male sexual imagination.
Bertrand Blier, an acclaimed director whose films scandalized, captivated and entertained 1970s and ’80s France with their sometimes brutal projections of French men’s sexual imaginations, died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his son Léonard Blier.
For two decades Mr. Blier was one of France’s most decorated directors, winning the grand prize at Cannes, an Academy Award for best foreign film for “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” released in 1978, and numerous Césars, France’s equivalent of the Oscar.
In a statement after his death, President Emmanuel Macron saluted Mr. Blier (pronounced blee-AY) as a “giant of French cinema, who marked our national imagination for five decades with his free, biting touch.”
Mr. Blier launched the careers of men and women who would dominate the French screen for decades, including Gérard Depardieu, with whom he made nine films. One of Mr. Blier’s last public acts was to join others in France’s film community to come to Mr. Depardieu’s defense in 2023 in the face of sexual harassment and assault accusations against the actor. (Mr. Macron also defended Mr. Depardieu, who now faces criminal charges and a March trial.)
Mr. Blier’s legacy is contested for the same reasons as Mr. Depardieu’s. His better-known films, and especially his breakthrough in 1974, “Les Valseuses” (“Going Places”), starring Mr. Depardieu, are permeated with misogyny and depictions of women as sex objects. Billed as a dark comedy, “Going Places” — the French title is slang for “testicles” — was an enormous box office success on its release, drawing an audience of nearly six million.
The film captured an aspect of the French male imagination, and French culture, that sees women as bodies existing to satisfy the needs of men.
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